We wrapped up The Quiet Man's conclusion no less than five minutes ago, and to say we’re baffled and bewildered would be an understatement. The bottom line is that Human Head Studios’ attempt at blending FMV with interactive combat scenes utterly fails in every conceivable way. In fact, everything about this project is truly perplexing, and to confuse matters even further, Japanese bigwig Square Enix actually forked out genuine money to publish this monstrosity.

So, where do we even begin? You play as Dane, a gentleman who is deaf. A protagonist who has lost their hearing is a half-decent concept in theory, but when put into practise, The Quiet Man gets it all wrong. Due to the disability, you won’t hear a single piece of spoken dialogue throughout the entire game, which immediately throws the overall plot into obscurity. From what we could piece together, Dane must rescue a female family member from the clutches of a masked figure.

It’s a short descriptor, because honestly, the game makes no sense whatsoever. Flashbacks to Dane’s childhood try to describe the relationships between characters, but they regularly contradict each other or continue to raise more questions than answers. And then back in the present day, motivations remain unclear, people come and go without rhyme or reason, and plot arcs are communicated horrendously. It’s this lack of verbal conversation that kills any understanding of what’s going on because despite characters and even Dane himself moving their lips and presumably speaking words, we never hear any of it. We seriously struggled to grasp any sort of cohesive narrative, and we’d be hard-pressed to believe that anyone else could too.

And then, there’s the biggest kicker of the lot. The Quiet Man doesn’t have a traditional ending, because it’s being delivered via DLC in a week’s time. This add-on will be free, but it leads to a scenario where the base game simply displays a countdown timer upon its completion. It felt like the rug has been pulled out from under us because after an incomprehensible three hours to make it to the climax, we’re made to wait a further seven days for what will most likely be one more ludicrous cutscene.

When you’re not trying to work out what each FMV sequence means, you’ll be taking the fight to supposed enemies in scenes where you’ll actually have to pick up the controller and play. Unfortunately, though, the combat system is just as atrocious as the ridiculous plot. Not a single one of its mechanics are explained, which led us to button mashing our way through the majority of brawls. And the biggest issue here is that there absolutely are cogs and gears for you to engage with, but we only know thanks to the Trophy list that speaks of close shave encounter attacks, beatdowns, and special environment finishers. We’ve unlocked each of those Trophies so apparently we did perform those moves at some point in the game, but we wouldn’t have known it at the time.

Boss fights do require a little more skill, with a dodge button becoming your biggest ally, but simply pounding on square and triangle will get you through most altercations. To be honest, the controls feel bad, with unresponsive inputs leading to a sense of clunkiness that never goes away. Woeful hit feedback worsens things with punches that fail to feel weighty and blows that can’t decide if they were blocked or not, while enemies themselves all originate from a few very particular character models. You'll often fight foes with the same appearance.

It’s this sense of cheapness that has a serious detriment on the transitions between FMV and the in-game sequences, too. The video looks fine, because of course it’s shot on high-quality cameras, but it’s this that makes the switch to the interactive scenes all the more glaring. There’s a very noticeable drop in presentational quality once it’s time to pick up the controller, with a sort of washed out effect that makes backgrounds and setting look incredibly lacklustre, while character’s faces could almost be an entirely different person. Obviously we weren’t expecting top of the line graphics, but The Quiet Man wouldn’t look out of place on a PlayStation 3.

As an overall product, we can’t state enough just how much of a negative impact the lack of sound has on the experience. It’s the title’s defining mechanic, but it doesn’t work in any practical manner. Long stretches of the game had us confused and befuddled by events on-screen, and at some point the wheels fall off completely and the whole affair starts to turn into a comedy sketch. It’s an experiment gone badly wrong, and an example to those who wish to dabble in the FMV genre of what not to do. We wish this was a "so bad it's good" situation where a slice of self-deprication could glean even a hint of enjoyment out of the experience, but it's sadly anything but.

Conclusion

There’s nothing else quite like The Quiet Man, and there’s a reason for that. The blend of FMV and interactive combat sequences fails on every level with an unfathomable plot that raises far more questions than it answers, and encounters that fail to explain themselves and do little to engage. The Quiet Man is the most baffling release of 2018, to the point where a post-mortem investigation into its sheer existence sounds so much more exciting than this bizarre and convoluted comedy sketch.

You haven't really put me off — in fact, I'm eager to play it more now. Aren't they going to like add the sound in or something? I think that might be what the countdown at the end is for. I swear I read somewhere that on the second playthrough you're going to be able to do it with all the audio put back in.

I was really intrigued by this one and have been somewhat looking forward to it but this certainly makes me think twice. I almost still wanna try it just to see if I can make any sense of it myself. It does sound pretty bizarre.

@get2sammyb I am with you. Despite the 2 score, I am completely intrigued by this title and want to play it more.

It seems more like every espect of what you don’t like about the game is intentional. I think the developer wants you to be disoriented and lost. I think the developer wants you to have to adapt the the game world without any form of hand-holding - maybe to represent the struggle of a deaf person having to adapt to the audible world.

I can understand hitting the game for laggy controls - that is a bummer.

Its a shame this has failed. if it was done right with more attention to detail and different casting I think it could have been a success. Weirdly they are adding sound next week which makes it not the quiet man anymore.

@hulkie that FULL HD video is a b***.
It is roughly like this:
a single frame of uncompressed full HD (1920x1080 pixels) video is roughly 6.2 MB
120 minutes (24 frames per second) of such uncompressed video is 1 TB (yes, terabyte)
When we use compression that is used for Bluray disks the file size comes down to, roughly 45+ GB
Youtube compresses this to almost 7 GB and Netflix to 5
and so on.
The moment you decide to include lots of full HD footage with your game you are immediately in Kansas is going bye-bye land (as in, the size does not correspond to other games' sizes and length of play).

I'm still kinda interested in this, it's cool that they're at least trying something different with this. However, I won't get this just yet as it seems like it's incomplete without that unreleased DLC.

My extremely reasonable prediction for the DLC:
the main character finds an anonymous package in his mailbox, containing a hearing aid and two pills. After swallowing the blue pill he puts on the hearing aid and starts his journey again. Now he can listen to NPCs joking about his permanent erection, so now he has a good reason to punch them.
The game rating rises too, from 2 to 3.

Sounds like the video promos were fairly accurate to the final product. I thought it looked kinda janky from the beginning. But as far as the haphazard story, the final installment DLC may just elucidate the whole thing. Maybe. I’ll probably never know.

@get2sammyb No underestimating here. Just undertestimating theyre skills to compress a little. The only explanation here is we just saw half the game,then the dlc will be just as long. Then the 37 gb will be almost justified.

I think the strange thing here, is shouldn't the main character be able to lip read or something? It sounds like we have less information than the deaf main character. I'm okay with the idea of silence, but it doesn't seem like it puts us in the main character's shoes anyways.@ShogunRok You should have "quietly" taken it out of the promising games section.

I feel like Liam missed the point of the entire game here. You play as a deaf guy and view the world similarly to how he would, right? Why would there be any sound? Deaf people don't automatically know how to lip read so it looks more like the game shows you what it's like to be deaf which I think is pretty cool.

@Chunky_Droid The literal lack of sound on its own isn't a massive problem, it's the way the game tries to tell a story around it that becomes a major problem. There's probably a way of telling a cohesive plot without any audio, but The Quiet Man fails at it magnificently.